Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Liberal Education: Its Value and Where Best Obtained; Oration Delivered at Des Moines College, Iowa, June 25, 1901
International Law, Buckle's History of Civiliza tion, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or thousands of other important works. Should we call the man. Liberally educated to whom such writings, in that very essential portion of them, the citation of authorities, are a sealed book? Yet such they are to the reader who knows only the vernacular language. The young man who, while in college, foregoes the advantage of an introduction into the study of languages misses a very essential part of a broad, liberal education. Knowl edge, even if it be only a beginning of knowledge of the languages, acquired in college and pursued after ward in the intervals of life's occupations, will be of the very highest value for the intellectual life. And it is an instrument of culture that should be continu ally kept in use, lest it rust and become useless.
In enumerating the college studies that will most largely contribute to a liberal education, I set in the first place study of languages. And I have no hesita tion in ranking as of equal importance with that study the habit and love of reading. Without that habit no man can attain a liberal education; without it I see not how a man can rise above the grade of a shop keeper or a mechanic. The daily occupations of the clerk or merchant or banker take up at the most eight or ten hours of one's day, leaving in every week many, many hours of inoccupation: if there is no fixed habitof reading and study, how will one employ that time profitably? The acquisitions made during the college career are lost, forgotten, and the man has as little part in the intellectual life of the age as has the green grocer.
The college, it cannot be too oft repeated, the col lege does not give the liberal education, but only the instruments by which one wins for himself a liberal education. The foundation is laid in the college; the superstructure is raised afterward. The foundation laid in the college should comprise at least these things.
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